This time it's personal

This book exudes the powerful aroma of a publisher's wheeze. I may be wrong, but I imagine I can hear the editor from Cape ringing up the great biographer and saying: "Oh Mr Campbell, we've got this wonderful idea for a book. It's right up your street, and it won't involve an enormous amount of work. The most you'll have to do is a bit of cutting and pasting from all those marvellous political biographies you've already written. We've got a lovely title, too. We're sure it will sell."

Not that there is anything wrong with that. Publishers' wheezes often produce perfectly good books, and this is a perfectly good book which will sell well, not least because it bears the name of one of Britain's finest political biographers. Wielding his paste pot and his scissors, he provides brief accounts of the personal battles between eight pairs of politicians, from Pitt and Fox in the 18th century to Blair and Brown in the 21st. It has a rather artificial feel in places, but is a rattling good read most of the time.

Campbell begins with some tired stuff about politics being about the securing and holding of power, adding that it also involves major issues of ideology, class and economic interests. He then adds the proposition that no great cause can be advanced except by the genius of an inspirational leader, and that it is the clash of these individuals that drives politics.

Well, no journalist is going to disagree with that, since the clash of individual politicians is the stuff of political journalism. Though Tony Benn insists that we should be concerning ourselves with "ishoos" rather than personalities, we hacks have consistently gone for the personalities. So far, Campbell is our man.

But a few pages later he goes further. He claims that the advent of mass democracy has brought politics full circle, back to the 18th-century world of patronage and mutual back-scratching where "there is nothing at stake but the achievement and retention of office and the opportunities for personal enrichment that it brings. Politics today is no more than a childish game played out by a small and introverted political class, largely ignored by a cynical and alienated electorate except when it throws up some titillating scandal."

The leader writers of the Sun and the Daily Mail will agree with that, but it is arrant nonsense nevertheless. Perhaps it was written just as rumours began to circulate about the seedy expenses fiddles of our MPs. If so, the bitterness is understandable. But a duck house, a moat and a bit of free gardening are hardly an "opportunity for personal enrichment". Indeed, it is the relative triviality of the sums involved which make the whole episode so squalid.

However, Campbell's views on our current democratic process are merely a bit of philosophical top dressing on what is essentially a potboiler. The entertainment is the eight essays on famous personal rivalries over four centuries, including the one which ended in an actual "pistols at dawn" encounter between George Canning and Lord Castlereagh on Putney Heath in 1809. Surprisingly, this is the least interesting of them all, mainly because it stemmed from convoluted personal intrigue on the part of Canning and pompous feelings of individual honour on the part of Castlereagh. The latter shot the former in the leg.

But then Campbell does not paint very flattering portraits of any of his 16 protagonists. Perhaps the one who appeals to him most is the most distant in terms of time - Charles James Fox, the fat, boozy, womanising enemy of the equally boozy but otherwise insufferably upright William Pitt. Campbell sees Fox as a cavalier to Pitt's roundhead, and suggests that all his eight pairs might be divided in this way. It is a nice thought, but I'm not sure it works for all of them. Between Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher, for instance, which was the cavalier and which the roundhead?

On the other hand, there wasn't much doubt which was which out of Gladstone and Disraeli (the prig and the embodiment of evil, in each other's eyes) or between Aneurin Bevan and Hugh Gaitskell (the bolshie miner and the prissy Wykehamist, as Campbell calls them) or between flat-footed Brown and charming Blair. During their 10 years as neighbours in Downing Street, Campbell sees Brown as the government's chief executive to Blair's non-executive chairman - ie the boss.

At the end of each chapter, Campbell asks who won. He thinks, for example, that Bevan lost to Gaitskell in the short run but has won posthumously because he has a monument in the NHS. And Brown and Blair? Well, Blair clearly won on a crude measure of success. But since the deal between them meant he had to cede virtual overlordship of his government, it is not clear cut.

And what of a second edition? Who will wield pistols at dawn in a Cameron cabinet? I reckon the editor at Cape is already keeping a file on it.